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OGMJU [One-Shot] PG-13

Violence and swearing. D:

This is definitely new territory for me, as I've never written anything I'd classify as a "war fic" before. It's brief but does contain a few swear words and a couple of not-extremely-descriptive violent scenes so if you happen to be unbelievably squeamish, you might not want to read it (although it's really not too bad so I wouldn't worry).

Not much to say, I guess. I hope you enjoy it. :)

Edit: And I just realized, like a fool, that I put a "U" in the title rather than a "Y." Sigh.

ONLY GOD MAY JUDGE YOU

He stepped over yet another furry, bleeding body, refusing to get as good of a look as he had with the last one. He just kept talking, partly to himself and partly to the dirty black canine following him dutifully.

He saw a blast of fire in the distance. An instant later, lightning erupted from the same location.

He mumbled, repeating a phrase that his mother had often used to comfort him before he had taken off. “If you truly believe in your cause, only God may judge you.” The words had lost all meaning, so overly familiar to his tongue by now that they were nothing more than foreign sounds, but comforting sounds all the same.

As happened more often than he liked, the words of the protesters forced their way onto his mind shortly after. They had looked right at him, directly into his eyes, and told him in no uncertain tone that what he was doing was wrong. He wasn’t angry. He always wondered how much right they had to pass judgment on him but managed every time to redirect his thoughts to something else before reaching a conclusion.

He stopped behind a burned jeep that had flipped onto its side and examined his companion. A few cuts lined her side but she was otherwise fine. He scratched behind her ear and she wagged her stub of a tail. People had thought it an insane move to bring such a small animal onto the battlefield but it had turned out to be a stroke of luck. Her small size gave her increased maneuverability and her slick black coat blended in perfectly with the now-charred land. They hadn’t been separated since the creature had been given to the boy as a gift years ago and neither considered war a sufficient excuse to leave each other behind.

She curled up next to him and he leaned back, looking toward the sky.

Why was the sky cloudy for every Goddamned battle he had fought? No rain, only grayness. In fact, it had been that way for days. A little sun was all he wanted, something to light the world that wasn’t an explosion or a wall of flames. He couldn’t take the dullness anymore. It was driving him crazy.

The endless, lumpy blanket of gray was split by the trail of a tire soaring towards them through the air.

“Move!” he screamed, jumping up and trusting that his friend was behind him as he ran several yards to the right. They both winced as the tire slammed against the wrecked vehicle, causing it to wobble. Knowing what was coming, they prepared themselves for yet another quick brawl. He had seen the man before. Or rather, men just like him. Dressed in what was once a jet black uniform now tarnished by dirt and ash, he spoke in a language that the boy couldn’t understand but recognized immediately as the language of the enemy.

The stranger’s Pokémon, however, was one he had never seen in person before. He was round, covered in rock plates that looked far too much like armor to believe it was selected based solely on a personal connection. Worst of all, his face and limbs, jutting out between the cracks of his shell, were prehistorically dangerous-looking, topped off by a deadly snarl on its face.

“Three!” the boy yelled instinctively, watching his pooch send a ball of flame flying from her lips with a bark. The numbers were a technique used to save time, replacing the long attack and maneuver names with snappier commands.

The fire, however, simply hit the stony enemy and was snuffed out in a puff of smoke.

Wasting no time, the enemy screamed his own garbled command while his partner reacted immediately, curling into a tight ball and rolling toward the boy with increasing speed.

“Shit!” He dived into the dirt while the rock creature sped by, pulling a hairpin turn the moment it realized it missed its target. Before it had the chance to take aim again, the boy was up and running. “One!” It was her most powerful fire attack, a stream rather than a blast, but it did little more than slow the opponent down. Its skin did glow red for a brief second, though, which seemed to aggravate it greatly.

They boy got an idea. “One!” The same attack was repeated. “Keep it up for as long as you can!” He dived yet again to dodge the rolling stone, squinting from the heat as the pursuing pup and trail of fire followed. “Good girl!” He glanced at the other man and saw he was screaming at his now-bright red Pokémon, something that had gone unnoticed until now.

Suddenly, apparently by command, the smoking, almost-bubbling boulder stopped. He stopped attacking, he stopped rolling, and judging from the dead look in his eyes, he had stopped caring. What followed happened too suddenly for the boy to comprehend immediately.

The Pokémon exploded.

Whether by the heat or a special technique, it became a living bomb, destroying both itself and the boy’s Pokémon, scorching the land around it, and covering the boy’s screams with a ringing left in the ears of anyone within hearing range. He wore his lungs out after only a few seconds, soon reducing his cries into wheezes and then nothing but sobs. She was absolutely decimated. Aside from a few scraps of hide and guts, she had crumbled into nothing more than a pile of ash.

Adding Pokémon to the battlefield was supposed to decrease the psychological damage of war. If you weren’t the one doing the actual killing, then the burden of murder would not be an issue. Pokémon were considered expendable. The military saw not the importance of the creatures to individual soldiers but rather the value of them as a weapon. It was a controversial view.

The boy ripped a knife from the small case on his belt and ran at the man without delay. Tears burned his eyes and blurred his vision. His target was enormous but there were no stakes left. They would both die eventually.

With this being the dominant thought in his mind, he dived through the air and stuck the blade as hard as he could into the guy’s chubby stomach and they both fell to the ground. Blood gurgled out and ran down his sides.

It was strange. The boy felt no pleasure now. He wasn’t even relieved to have avenged his Pokémon. In fact, he felt nothing now. Why was the anger gone? Where was the fear? He pulled the knife from the flesh and stared at it. He had murdered. He had reacted in a single flash of rage and had murdered another human being.

The world was silent now. The gray seemed fitting. If he could survive long enough to get back home, he would probably be rewarded for bravery. That was meaningless to him, though. The opinions of bloodthirsty bastards and supporters who only saw in black and white literally meant nothing. He could only wonder what God would think.